Nearly three-quarters of America's new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are African-American women. Black women between 25 and 44 are 13 times more likely to die of the disease than white women of the same age.

It is one of the most underreported news stories of this new decade, and sadly, more women will die before we pay attention.

Black women and their sexuality are the focus of Wyatt's research since she conducted the first study of black women's sexuality in 1980. A professor and associate director of the AIDS Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, she included 4,000-5,000 women ages 18-80 in her research for "Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives" (Wiley, $12.95).

She concluded that black women are too easily influenced by what others think of us and depreciate ourselves based on those opinions.

"There isn't any group in the world that has experienced what we have, over 400 years of the kind of slavery we experienced, isolated in language, physical contact and relationships developed at the whim of someone else."

Wyatt says many black women have no healthy perspective to use to model relationships.

"Since we've failed to address the problem, we go limping along, trying to walk but never having a chance to heal." Black women's sexuality "is looked upon by others as aberrant, hypersexual, irresponsible, spontaneous and at the risk of one's life, one's health and well-being. The irony of it is that ... we have women who are actually living their lives as a stereotype, and they don't even know it. ..."

Be the messenger

Wyatt said that black women must accept the responsibility of taking back our lives and our bodies. "No one will or can do that for African-American women except African-American women," she said. "We have to be the messengers of a very different message, one that makes young and old, married and single, thin and fat, tall and short aware of our personal responsibilities.

"Women are literally dying with no idea of how they got into the relationships they're in or ended up doing some of the things that they've done."

Yes, it's an uncomfortable conversation. But it's a necessary one. Wyatt says that our communities are not outraged enough, like it's OK for 72 percent of new AIDS cases to be black women.

"Our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, our children are just as ignorant about their own personal responsibility as women were 400 years ago," she says.

"We have too few men. Who survive prison. Who are in relationships with women. ... So we have some major concessions that women are making to stay in the game, and those concessions may be to have unprotected sex with someone they may know uses drugs or who has more than one partner; to not talk about condom use for fear that burden might discourage a partner ... because she's wanting to be trusted and be loved.

"That's not an acceptable opinion today."

Mothers need help

Gail Wyatt is doing G-d's work. She is forcing a conversation long overdue, particularly in a community like Detroit, where more than two-thirds of new babies are born to single women, many of them poor and most of them black.

If we as black women won't change for the children, maybe we'll change to save our own lives. Because 72 percent of all new AIDS cases are us.

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Rochelle Riley is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Comment by clicking here.